Starting in June 1919, the question of class quickly emerged as a central one
in May Fourth cultural and political thinking. The radicals who expressed
this with the greatest sharpness were those of the older generation, more
sensitive to the political emergence of Chinese labor than the younger generation of New Culture radicals, who were still most interested in cultural
change. It was also these older radicals who most feared the imminent appearance of class conflict in China, and believed it would threaten the Chinese
revolution. In 1919 they displayed the greatest urgency in seeking ways to
incorporate labor into politics so as to forestall violent social upheaval. They
discovered their answer in a variety of corporatist socialisms.

The term corporatism, like socialism has been applied to movements that
run the gamut of the political spectrum. I use it here as it has been employed
in studies of European politics in recent years: a means of transcending capitalism through the use of class reconciliation rather than conflict.
1 The sense
in which the term has been absorbed into Chinese political vocabulary supports this use. A recent Chinese dictionary defines the term corporatism as
"class reconciliationism" (jieji tiaohe zhuyi).2 I shall use it to describe those
currents in Chinese socialism that accepted class as a fundamental fact of
contemporary social organization but rejected political solutions premised on
the inevitability of class struggle. The intention was not to abolish classes,
but to reorganize the articulation of social interest so as to render class struggle unnecessary. To the extent that socialism assumed political form in May
Fourth thinking, it appeared in a number of guises that promised this kind
of peaceful social revolution.

Guomindang Socialism in the May Fourth Period

The new consciousness of labor and its implications, with all the contradictions it brought out, was nowhere more evident than in the writings of Dai
Jitao and his coeditors in the Weekend Review, which with the other Guomindang-related publications, Awakening and Construction, emerged between

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